There are several known disorders that adversely affect the speech of many people. For example, Parkinson disease (PD) multiple sclerosis, strokes, ataxic dysarthria, aging voice, and vocal fold paralysis impact the speech of many persons. Traditional neuropharmacological and neurosurgical treatments have been of limited help in improving these problems with conventional wisdom being that speech disorders are resistant to medical treatments and efforts at traditional speech therapy have been considered ineffective.
The landscape, however, has changed recently, and experimental data from a focused program of specialized speech therapy has been shown to provide significant benefits, which may include improved speech intelligibility, motor functions and neural functioning. These treatment effects have been shown to be relatively long lasting without additional treatment and have been considered the first Type 1 evidence for speech treatment for PD.
Speech treatment is an immediate, practical, and relatively inexpensive intervention for improving behavior. There is no requirement for FDA regulation, and an efficacious treatment is available, easily delivered and highly acceptable to patients with minimal, if any, negative side effects.
Speech treatment may be effectively carried out in a clinical setting with sophisticated hardware and speech analysis equipment. But these clinical locations may be inconvenient, unavailable and/or too expensive for many patients to take advantage of. Although microphones and rudimentary speech analysis software are available, typical consumer-grade microphones are currently not able to accurately measure one or more important characteristics of the user's voice. For example, measurements of the sound pressure level and fundamental frequency of a user's voice are often too inaccurate with many affordable microphones to provide the type of analysis desired for speech therapy purposes.